The Coach House open house

Coach House Books held its annual open house on Thursday, Sept. 6, inviting all and sundry to a get-together at its editorial/printing offices in downtown Toronto.

Coach House owner Stan Bevington celebrates good times.

Author Jessica Westhead next to pages of her forthcoming novel Pulpy and Midge, which was being printed during the party.

Pulpy and Midge rolls into being.

Coach House’s Nicky Drumbolis fills in partygoers on the ins and outs of bookbinding.

Indie authors Derek McCormack and Nathaniel G. Moore soak up the last-days-of-summer fun.

Author and Friend of Coach House Kevin Connolly mans the bar.

Watch this space: Q&Q on Klein

You may have heard that Naomi Klein has a new book out this week, The Shock Doctrine. Watch the reviews section of the Q&Q website tomorrow for contributor Dan Rowe’s review of the book. The review will be posted early on Saturday, Sept. 8.

Literary justice

Last month, if you’ll recall, we blogged a story in The Guardian about Polish pulp fiction author Krystian Bala, whom police had arrested for a seven-year-old murder. They were tipped off, it seems, by the author’s own novel, Amok, which featured a killing that was much too similar to the real-world one. When last we checked in, the case against Bala seemed somewhat circumstantial, but it appears to have been good enough for the courts. According to The Washington Post, Bala has now been convicted and sentenced.

The killer in Bala’s alcohol- and sex-fueled “Amok” gets away with his grisly crime. But on Wednesday, a court in Wroclaw sentenced Bala to 25 years in prison for planning and directing the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski.

“The evidence gathered gives sufficient basis to say that Krystian Bala committed the crime of leading the killing of Dariusz Janiszewski,” Judge Lidia Hojenska said. “He was the initiator of the murder; his role was leading and planning it.”

Hojenska said it was not clear who actually did the killing and who might have aided Bala in the crime, but the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to Bala’s involvement in the events that led to Janiszewski’s disappearance.

The judge’s seeming tendency to conflate Bala’s own personality with that of his fictional protagonist is a bit troubling, but in any event, Bala sounds like such an ultra-creep that it’s hard to feel that justice wasn’t served. Incidentally, anyone out there know how his novel is selling now?

The underperforming Man Booker contenders

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. After yesterday’s shortlist announcement, however, they’re positively hornswoggled. The most disturbing element of the list, according to The Telegraph, is that all but one of the authors – Ian McEwan – are practically unheard of, and that a full four of them have sold less than a thousand copies of their books.

While McEwan’s novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal’s People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in [the U.K.] by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker’s Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright’s The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan’s rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it.